Is "tear our walls down" really what we want?
On unhealthy walls, healthy boundaries, and slippery churchy language
I feel like you don’t have to look far to find a Christian worship song that implores God to break our walls down, or something along those lines.
The metaphor strikes me as a slippery one. What exactly are these walls that we’re asking God to break down?
Are they unhealthy impediments to good relationships with God, self, others, and our world? Or are they healthy boundaries that define who we are—where we end and others begin?
Are we talking about an overdeveloped spiritual guardedness that keeps us from receiving love from God and others? Or are we talking about a totally healthy caution that chooses to let trustworthy people in?
In religious environments that often refuse to affirm and honor people’s boundaries—and in a world where women, people of color, and others on the underside of societal power structures are often expected not to assert and maintain boundaries—I want to be very careful about this.
I feel like I had a bit of a breakthrough, recently, when my friend
led an open-ended contemplative prayer time at a local park on whulge / Puget Sound (the same park of Bufflehead and other seabird fame). Jenna’s thoughtful prompt for reflection centered on the idea of seawalls.At this park, a literal seawall was built in the 1970s and not taken down until the mid-aughts. As Jenna wrote in her prompt, the seawall “made for easy drive-up access to snap a photo of a sunset, but ultimately led to habitat destruction from the deeply scouring waves that prevented sediment from redepositing on the beach.”
The wall was not good for the natural shoreline community, all the plants and animals who live on and around the beach.
Taking this literal history as a jumping-off point, Jenna invited reflection on metaphorical seawalls in our lives. She posed these questions:
Are there ways you “feel separated from nature, others and/or the Divine”?
Where are you “in the process of breaking down seawalls between you and others/nature/Divine”?
As I meandered along the beach, I connected immediately with the image of a seawall.
I know I walk through life, and especially through anything that has to do with church, with some walls up. Especially in the last few years, since leaving the evangelical world and wondering what community looks like now, I’m often *just a tad* guarded.
Like so many others, I’ve been through some church trauma. (Get yourself a copy of Nice Churchy Patriarchy if you want some of the deets.) All this has impacted how I move in churchy spaces now. I’m not nearly as open as I once was.
I reflected on this for a bit—on the seawalls I’ve developed as a response to trauma.
And then I moved on to reflect on the idea of breaking down some of those seawalls. And I thought, No. I don’t want to do that.
And I also thought: I don’t think I should want to do that.
The hard reality is that, for many of us, churches are often not emotionally safe. There are (well-meaning) people who would betray our trust if we spoke with them of vulnerable things.
And, on top of that, there may be certain ideas of God that we once had, and people around us once had, that we no longer invite into our lives. This is all part of our journey, part of our growth.
Because of these things, my seawalls are strong. And I actually love that. I’m all for building and maintaining emotional, relational, spiritual, and theological boundaries.
I’ve got some seawalls, and I don’t actually want these seawalls broken down. I want them to be—and stay—strong. I’m happy that they’re strong.
I’m not interested in the vague worship song language of God breaking our walls down. I think it depends what the walls are, where the walls are.
I wholeheartedly agree with Jenna’s prompt and the idea that some seawalls might keep me from connecting more fully with others, nature, and/or the Divine. I long to connect in deeper and truer ways with others, nature, and the Divine.
But I don’t want just any walls broken down. I want those particular walls broken down.
I love that I have some seawalls, and I plan to keep them. But I also recognize that sometimes I might have seawalls in the wrong places, or seawalls that stretch a tad too far.
I don’t want to break the seawalls down—and I certainly don’t want anyone else to break them down—but there might be times when I need to move some of them around.
I want my seawalls to keep out the toxic church nonsense. To keep out the toxic theologies. To keep out the toxic constructions of god. To keep out the people who don’t feel emotionally safe to me.
But where I have seawalls up in the wrong places—seawalls that keep me from fully receiving the good things about a church community, that keep me hesitant to seek out new theologies that might be good, that keep me from being present with and open to Divine love and the unexpected forms God takes (perhaps including the sacred other), that keep me from being my full authentic self with people who are emotionally safe—when it comes to those walls, I’m open to change. I’m open to rearrangement.
This is the power of boundaries. There are plenty of things I can’t control about who and what people and other forces enter my life. But there are some things I can influence. I can exercise agency in how I engage with these forces and people.
I’m not here to ask God to tear down our walls willy-nilly.
But perhaps as we reflect on those walls—their locations and functions, and which ones are and are not serving us and our communities—we become more fully present to engage in mutually loving, connected ways with others, God, and nature.
We become more fully ourselves. And I am here for that.